The Paradox of Neo-liberalism

Abstract

Gane talks about a new style of liberalism, one that is now widely recognized as neo-liberalism, worked up an alternative to every kind of socialism and state-led social welfare. Taken up by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, neo-liberalism announced 'there is no such thing as society'--and it soon became clear that a number of sociological terms were needed to describe the new phenomenon: affluent, post-industrial, post-modern, leisure, information, consumer, the 'risk society'. He discusses new miraculous but paradoxical society in two ways: the first is the very form its governmentality as an institutionalized anti-socialism, the second is the shift of its culture towards competitive and ludic mechanisms. Gane concludes that in the neo-liberal experiment, contemporary culture itself can be seen to be increasingly composed of types of regulated game-like competitions, and a new kind of social structure can be seen to emerge from the overall composition to which these new mechanisms give rise. Neo-liberalism is a phase in which there is a new relation between the economic and the social and the state. Or in terms developed by Durkheim and Caillois, neo-liberalism might be thought of as a new stage of socialism--it might be called 'negative socialism'--in which there is a new kind of corruption of the game.